When he had prayed, he went away, with reverently bent head, and she
heard that he trod softly. In two hours he came back, knelt again, and
again repeated Latin words. She knew that he was doing it for a show of
sorrow, and she wished to kill him. Then, when he was softly gone again,
she wondered how soon she herself was to die. There were two servants in
the room, behind her, keeping watch. They were relieved by two others,
changing through the night. She heard them come and go, but did not turn
her head.
When the dawn forelightened, like the ghost of a buried day risen from
the grave to see its past deeds, she was not yet dead. She had once read
how the murderers of Vittoria Accoramboni had been torn with red-hot
pincers and otherwise grievously tortured, and how knives had been
thrust deep into their breasts just where the heart was not, but near
it, and how they had died hard, for they had lived more than half an
hour with the knives in them, and at the last had been quartered alive.
She had not believed what she had read, but now she knew that it was
true. She envied them the searing, the tearing, and the knives which had
at last killed them, though they had died so hard.
The wan dawn turned the dead man's face from waxen yellow to stone grey.
The servants saw it, whispered, and closed the inner shutters, and the
yellow candle-light shone again in the room. Any light is better than
daylight on a dead face.
Matilde sat still, bowed and covered.
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